Ramesh Ponnuru: Collapsing under the weight of logic

Even Newt Gingrich's toughest critics concede the former speaker of the House is a font of ideas.

Even Newt Gingrich’s toughest critics concede the former speaker of the House is a font of ideas.

Republican voters who listen to him hear bold, exciting proposals, made with complete confidence in their workability. But even his fans concede not all of his ideas are good.

Take Social Security. Gingrich correctly labels as a “fantasy” the notion it can “survive without any structural reforms.” He advocates allowing people to invest some of the funds they currently submit to Social Security in “personal accounts.” Under the right circumstances, personal accounts can be a useful way of setting aside money today for future retirements and of democratizing capital ownership.

But then comes the Gingrich twist: His plan guarantees if people’s investments fail, they will still get all the benefits that current law promises them. How can the government save money while giving everyone their promised benefits and making up unlucky or incompetent investors’ shortfalls?

On immigration, too, Gingrich starts with a set of sensible premises. We need to be able to enforce our immigration laws, but “the American people are not heartless” and will not deport illegal immigrants who have spent years putting down roots here. Gingrich puts forward two distinctive solutions. One is a temporary work program proposed by the Vernon K. Krieble Foundation to satisfy businesses’ demand for labor. But there’s a problem with temporary work programs: What if their participants have kids while they are here?

Current law treats those children as citizens. To enforce the time limit on the program, the government has three options: tear apart families; eject citizens; or change the law to strip those kids of citizenship.

The foundation picks Option 3. Gingrich is silent about which he would pick.

Gingrich’s second immigration idea is to establish local community boards to decide which illegal immigrants should stay and which should go. If some boards decide to offer sanctuary to everyone and others are tough, or if some boards practice blatant discrimination, will there be another layer of bureaucracy to review their decisions?

Consider, finally, Gingrich’s desire to weaken the federal courts. The view the courts have much more power than they used to have, and that this change is mostly unfortunate, is a respectable one. The view Congress and the president should respond on occasion by limiting the courts’ jurisdiction, as Gingrich wants, ought to be respectable, too.

But Gingrich cannot stop there. He also has to call for Congress to summon judges to explain their decisions, which would be both pointless and wrong. And he wants to abolish liberal circuit courts and replace them with conservative ones, which is an obvious attempt to ignore the Constitution’s grant of life tenure to judges.

Anyone who proposes that judicial power should be checked arouses the suspicion that what he really wants is freedom from the constraints of the law. Gingrich’s solution to this problem is to confirm the charge instantaneously.

Gingrich has more original ideas than most of us. But for a president, what’s much more important is the ability to tell the good ones from the bad — an ability called judgment.